Forbidden Stranger Read online

  She’d forgotten, not that she’d told him that, but the specifics of why she’d said that in the first place. Frowning, she chewed the inside of her cheek for a second. “Probably everything, I guess. I’m still forgetful. I don’t remember what I meant to say, to be honest.”

  “Are you doing the exercises the doc left for you?”

  Along with the physical routine of getting her body back in its best working order and the daily meds, she’d been given a series of mental exercises designed to work out her short-term memory. Number matching, pattern recognition. That sort of thing. She never minded working her body, but she hated the mental tasks, mostly because they seemed to have been designed for toddlers or people with dementia. The colors, music, “rewards” of chipper cartoon characters praising her, all smacked of condescension.

  “Of course I am,” she lied.

  “They’re supposed to help. Working on your short-term memory is the key to triggering the long-term.”

  Nina lifted the glass and studied it. “And if it doesn’t? I’ll have permanent amnesia for large chunks of my life. Sometimes about my life when I was eight years old, sometimes about what happened to me at eight o’clock this morning. I have brain damage, Ewan. From everything you all have told me, I’m lucky to be alive. That’s what’s important, right?”

  Her own tone didn’t even sound convincing, but Ewan nodded. “Absolutely. Glad you’re alive. But it doesn’t hurt to hope that you’re going to make a full recovery.”

  “Is that all it is? Hope?”

  “Without hope,” Ewan said, leaning forward, his tone almost fierce, “what’s the point of anything?”

  Later, the echo of his voice filled her head as she slipped naked between fresh sheets and beneath the heavy comfort of her thick blankets. Nina looked up, up, into the darkness of her bedroom. Hope.

  It was really all she had.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Ewan hadn’t yet told Nina he’d be living full-time on the island, but Aggie and Jerome knew. He’d offered them both a severance package, fully expecting them both to take it but grateful when Aggie informed him that if it was all right with Ewan, the pair of them planned to stay on.

  “We both only have a few more years until retirement,” she told him over mugs of hot, sweet tea in the morning. Nina had gone out for her daily run, leaving Ewan and Aggie the freedom to talk without fear of being overheard. “As far as jobs go, Mr. Donahue, I could scarcely ask for a better one. I’ve grown quite fond of your Ms. Bronson, as I’m sure you can tell. I’d like to stay on to see her get better.”

  “She might never get better,” Ewan said.

  Aggie smiled. “She might not ever remember everything, but that doesn’t mean she won’t get better. Now, tell me all about the new laws.”

  Ewan gave her the rundown on what had been passed. The enhancement tech itself was still illegal for use in any new patients, but the upgrades that kept the original recipients functioning without additional mental stress were now approved. Neither he nor his team had yet been able to find a way to remove or disable the self-termination programming, but Ewan had made sure that all of the remaining enhanced soldiers would be eligible to receive the upgrades and any that came after without cost, courtesy of Donahue Enterprises, for as long as they lived.

  “Very generous,” Aggie said, when he’d finished telling her everything.

  Ewan shook his head at her praise. “Not generous. It’s all my responsibility.”

  “You take on a lot of that, don’t you? Responsibility.” The older woman looked up from the round ball of dough she was kneading. It would become a savory loaf of crusty sourdough bread.

  “Shouldn’t I?”

  “It’s admirable and surprising.”

  “I can’t say I like to hear that it’s surprising,” Ewan said ruefully.

  “I must confess to you, it wasn’t what I thought of you when you first hired me and Jerome. I’d looked you up, of course. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know who you were. Who our dear Nina was.” Aggie thumped the dough with her strong fists, then began to shape it into a loaf. “To be honest, I didn’t expect to like you very much.”

  “But now you do?” Ewan grinned, not offended at anything she’d said. He knew he’d had a well-earned reputation.

  Aggie nodded and settled the loaf onto the baking sheet, then covered it with a clean towel so it could rise again. She put her hands on her hips. “Sure and enough, I do. It will be nice having you around here more often. She’ll like it, too, I wager.”

  Ewan wasn’t sure what to say about that. Aggie knew he and Nina had been romantically involved. He’d never mentioned it, but he was sure Aggie knew he was still in love with Nina. The man he’d been before meeting Nina would not have cared what Aggie thought about this arrangement of keeping the lover who could not remember him isolated here on the island. He wouldn’t have thought twice about how it looked, or what it meant for Nina. He would never have sought validation from an employee. Loving Nina had changed him.

  “Do you think I’m doing the right thing? Moving here full-time, I mean.”

  Aggie studied him as she pulled a mixing bowl toward herself and began adding ingredients for another loaf of bread. “It’s your home as much as it’s any of ours. I would say you’ve more right than anyone to live here instead of only visiting.”

  “I want more time with her,” he said. “I want to be here to help her. I just . . . want to be around her.”

  “Of course you do. You love her.”

  The words were a tiny stab. “Yes. But she doesn’t love me. She might never love me again, Aggie.”

  “She might not,” Aggie agreed. “She might never remember you were ever anything more to her than her boss.”

  “If she does remember that, and safely, she might hate me.”

  Aggie chuckled and shook her head. “I’ve no idea why, though I’m sure you have good reason to think so. But let me tell you something, Mr. Donahue. When someone loves you the way you love that girl, it’s terribly difficult to hate that person.”

  “Trust me, she did. She could again.” Ewan frowned. “I hurt her, Aggie. So much.”

  “She forgave you, didn’t she?”

  Ewan thought to the times he’d hurt Nina, and how she had, each time, forgiven him. How they’d been trying to make it work, despite everything that had happened and every reason they had for why they should not be together. “I can’t expect her to forgive me for everything, forever.”

  “Why not? Isn’t love about forgiveness?”

  “Nobody should expect that of someone else,” Ewan said. “Love doesn’t give you a free pass to hurt someone, over and over again.”

  Aggie pursed her lips and shook her head. “So you did it on purpose, did you?”

  “Of course I didn’t, but that doesn’t make it any better,” Ewan said. “I’m still the reason for every bad thing that ever happened to her.”

  She paused to look at him steadily. “Every single bad thing? Really? I’d heard rumors that you were arrogant, but until now I wouldn’t have agreed.”

  “I’m being honest,” Ewan said.

  Aggie pointed one strong finger in his direction. “You might have been the source of some bad things, sure, and aren’t we all a source of pain to our loved ones? It’s a rare thing, indeed, when the one you love doesn’t hurt you at least a little bit, here or there. It’s not the hurting that matters in the end, Mr. Donahue. It’s what you do to fix it. And it would seem to me that you’re doing your best to fix your Nina. The rest will come along with it.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Then you love her enough to let her go,” Aggie told him.

  * * *

  “I hate you. I hate you so damned much.” Nina spoke the words through gritted teeth and gestured at the tablet in front of her.

  On the screen, bright colored jewels clustered in a grid. She was supposed to tap the groups of more than four, which would make them disappear